


Persephone

by crookedassembly



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Mirror Universe
Genre: 2010, Alternate Reality, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Mirror Universe, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-24 03:53:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16632407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedassembly/pseuds/crookedassembly
Summary: Originally inspired by this prompt at the kink meme:Mirror!McCoy isn't part of Star Fleet, he's just a doctor, who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Mirror!Kirk is hurt. The Mirror!Crew kidnaps McCoy, who saves Kirk's life and afterwards, Kirk decides to keep McCoy for personal and professional reasons.Deviates pretty much from the very first line, however - because of course Jim needed to be involved in the kidnapping effort.(previously posted under sometimesophie on LJ)





	Persephone

**Author's Note:**

> Written a long time ago.

McCoy’s barely one swallow into his too-warm whiskey when the man enters the bar. There’s no loud swing of saloon doors or sudden hush of conversation to mark his arrival, but McCoy’s eyes are drawn inexorably to the doorway all the same. He watches the stranger walk in - too confident in such a shithole of a place, too smooth - then carefully shifts his attention back down to his drink. The whiskey doesn’t improve much for being downed in one, but he doesn’t notice, _escape_ the only thing on his mind.

McCoy deals in the survival trade. He knows all too well that the only people who grow old enough to run the happy risk of heart disease and cancer are those that recognise danger when it walks into a bar on a close, muggy evening and are smart enough to get the hell out. And this stranger, with his golden hair and blue eyes, with his clean cut face, might as well have DANGER tattooed across his forehead it’s so evident in the way he smiles at the barman, at the way he perches on a barstool.

Ducking his head, McCoy gets up, shrugs into his jacket -- and freezes when another full glass is thunked heavily down on the bar in front of him.

The barman meets his eyes and there’s the barest suggestion of pity in his own as he jerks his head in the stranger’s direction. “With compliments,” he grunts, and promptly vanishes, escaping to the far side of the bar to polish glasses with furious abandon.

McCoy stares at the drink, clamping down hard on the urge to ignore the offering - to hightail it out of the building without a backwards glance. Running from a predator could be just as dangerous as standing still, he knows. Better to seem weak, play dead, be uninteresting - running only makes them want to chase you. With admirably steady fingers, he reaches out and grips the glass.

The stranger is looking at him when he turns, a strange, closed expression on his face, and McCoy raises the whiskey to him and nods. It’s a mental battle to make himself sip the drink under such observation, his mind throwing up the names of several easily procurable, dissolvable drugs, the very least of which would cause death. He keeps the consolation that he’s a nobody close to his chest - nothing but a washed-up medicine man on a backwater planet, so unimportant in the grand scheme of the Empire that no one could possibly care enough to take a hand in whether he lived or died. The whiskey burns on his tongue, perfect temperature this time, exactly how he likes it. Of fucking course.

“I’m Jim Kirk,” the man says, next to him all of a sudden, much too close, and McCoy flinches hard enough to slosh some of the liquid over his fingers. Fuck, but the guy can move damn quick when he wants, already sliding onto the stool next to McCoy and leaning against the bar like he owns the place.

Something about the name tugs at McCoy’s brain but he can’t place it and there’s no titles or honorifics to accompany it - a fact which makes the tense line of his shoulders relax a little. Up close, the stranger’s just a kid, and McCoy wonders whether he’s becoming paranoid in his old age, unable to leave the pain and death he sees behind him when he shuts up his practice and goes home for the day.

“McCoy,” he says, grudgingly, after a moment, because the kid seems to be waiting for something. “Thanks for the drink.”

Kirk doesn’t say anything, just continues to watch him. More nervous than he cares to be, McCoy swirls the amber liquid around the bottom of the glass and scowls. He takes another sip, weighing up the dangers of staying with those of leaving, and makes up his mind. Damn this kid and his unsettling blue eyes.

“You caught me at a bad time,” he mutters, keeping his eyes down and the lie simple. “I was just on my way out of here. I’ve got an early start tomorrow.”

Kirk smiles at that and leans in. “I wouldn’t count on it,” he says, pleasantly. “The rensis leaf I laced that drink with has certain desirable qualities - paralysis and relaxation of the sphincter muscles to name a couple - but I’m told the hangover the next day is always a bitch.”

McCoy stares at him in horror, his mouth gone dry, his fingers numb where they grip around the glass. _Rensis leaf_ , his mind catalogues. _Extremely rare; occasionally used in torture; roofie of choice for the pathologically insane._

“But ingestion of rensis is _lethal_.”

Kirk’s smile only grows.

McCoy swallows the urge to puke. It sure as hell wouldn’t help him now. Gripping fingers into Kirk’s collar, he drags the kid towards him “You’re one sick son of a bitch,” he growls, shaking him. “How much did you give me, huh? How _much_?”

Kirk’s eyes have gone narrow and dangerous, and he’s not smiling anymore. It transforms his face into something more adult, more deadly, but McCoy doesn’t care, already a dead man anyway, and he shakes him again, like he can spill the answers he wants from those lips. He has to act quick, he knows. Before the creeping tendrils of paralysis consume him and he can’t act _at all_.

“Doctor McCoy,” Kirk says, and the hard, unavoidable truth of a phaser jams up beneath McCoy’s ribs, “don’t make me kill you a second time.”

McCoy freezes, his fingers going lax. He looks into Kirk’s face, into those blue eyes, and suddenly, desperately, wants to put as much distance between himself and this man as humanly possible.

“I never said I was a doctor,” he says, with a sinking certainty.

Kirk smiles again, a little too much teeth on show. “Don’t worry. I never said I was a captain, either.” With the hand not otherwise occupied with holding the phaser, he pulls out a communicator and flips it open. “Kirk to Enterprise. Two to beam up.”

 

 

The Vulcan is too pale. Too still. If it weren’t for the pulsating light of the monitors, McCoy would think him already dead. The blood crusted over the Vulcan’s hands, dark rimmed crescents beneath his fingernails, the thick smear of it down his chest, is a dull red. Human red. It matches the arterial splashes on the walls, the congealed pool in the centre of the sickbay, the scraped bloody drag marks leading out the door.

Kirk catches him looking.

“M’Benga,” he says, darkly. “The previous CMO. He got off lightly, believe me.”

It was messy work for a Vulcan. If Kirk was to be believed, it was messy work for a Vulcan who had been rensis-poisoned and sentenced to an hour in an agony booth. By all laws of nature, at the time he was brought to Sickbay, First Officer Spock should have been in full-body paralysis or driven irretrievably insane by the pain. He should not have been capable of deducing the identity of his poisoner - let alone possess the strength to kill the man.

McCoy thinks Kirk is probably right: M’Benga _did_ get off lightly.

Carefully - oh so carefully - he works at the thick metal binding Spock to the biobed, using nothing but the pads of his fingers to release the heavy catches at the Vulcan’s wrists.

“It took a full security team to contain him,” Kirk says, watching him. Then, offhand: “Two of them died.”

Moving down to the restraints at the Vulcan’s ankles, McCoy can feel the weight of Kirk’s gaze on him, and he scowls down at his work, ignoring the warning.

“You bother researching the properties of that goddamn drug before you fucking spiked me with it? Or did you just figure what the heck, date rape and death, might as well give it a go? Rensis leaf sounds nice and fucking _friendly_ , right?”

Suddenly, Kirk is right there, in his space, hand clamped tight around his wrist, dragging him around to face him. McCoy can feel the individual bite of each of Kirk’s fingers pressing into the fragile network of nerves and tendons and arteries and carpel bones that comprise his wrist. He grits his teeth against the pain, swallows against the grind of bone, the throb of trapped blood, and tries not to pass out.

_Better to seem weak, play dead, be uninteresting._

“If you want to survive this experience, doctor,” Kirk growls, the words hot on McCoy’s face, “I would watch that pretty mouth.”

“Let go,” McCoy manages, spasms of pain shooting up his arm like nothing he’s ever felt before. “You brought me here. If you want me to - to save him, you need to - Jesus _fuck_ \- need to let go.”

Thankfully, after a strained moment, Kirk does. McCoy steadies himself against the biobed and sucks in great gulping breaths of air. Kirk doesn’t step away, staying where he is - too close, forever too close - and McCoy fancies he can feel the infinitesimal shift in air temperature against his skin. Even Kirk’s body heat feels like a threat.

Only when he feels strong enough does McCoy hazard looking at Kirk, one of the man’s eyebrows raised in an unspoken question.

“Rensis,” McCoy says, a little hoarse, in answer. “It increases the body’s sensitivity to external stimuli a hundred-fold. If your previous CMO simply wanted your first officer dead, there’s many more suitable poisons he could have easily found in this sickbay.”

Kirk digests that. “He waited for Spock to be reprimanded,” he says. He sounds angry and grudgingly impressed.

McCoy nods his head in the affirmative and feels a little sick. He has no idea how the Vulcan managed to survive the agony booth. He imagines M’Benga was just as surprised by the feat when Spock turned up to kill him.

God, and this is exactly why McCoy fucking _hates_ Starfleet.

He pops the catch on the final restraint and feels happier knowing the Vulcan isn’t subjected to the heavy press of metal at wrists and ankles anymore. Paralysis isn’t the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness, and from the read of the machine monitoring brain activity, McCoy is certain Spock is feeling everything.

He turns to Kirk. “I need to know exactly how much you gave me.”

Kirk shakes his head. “Oh no,” he says. “You save him first. Then I’ll decide whether you’ve earned your life back.”

Brazenly, McCoy meets Kirk’s eyes. He hopes the fear eating away at his insides isn’t clear on his face. “Then you’re sentencing us both to death,” he says.

Kirk’s fingers clench into fists at his sides and, for a moment, McCoy thinks he’s going to reach out and grab him again. “If it’s so necessary to know quantities,” Kirk says, slowly, dangerously, “Spock’s life is already forfeit. We have no way of knowing how much M’Benga gave him. Don’t screw with me.”

“No,” McCoy says, willing Kirk to believe him. He fumbles for the voice of his profession. “If used in the wrong quantities, the antidote to rensis leaf is itself lethal. If I can dose myself with it, I can then monitor your first officer and gradually administer it in small measures without risking an overdose. That, however, will take time - time I don’t have. I have no way of judging how long I have until I lose motor function completely.”

Kirk narrows his eyes. “Neatly removing my leverage.”

McCoy swallows the bitter laughter swelling thick and hysterical in his chest. All his life, he has been careful. Every year, he’s returned his taxes on time, with just that little extra to grease the wheels. At university, he was clever but never too clever, his grades consistent but not enough to garner attention. At Starfleet, he intentionally misunderstood two out of every three things they taught him, and he was released from service as those at the top of the class were corralled into learning the art of torture, the art of war. For as long as he can remember, he has given way to those stronger than him with nothing but a nod and a bland smile while anger crawled hot and burning up his throat. Years of avoiding the Empire’s notice, of _surviving_ , and a blond-haired kid walks into a bar one day like it’s a good fucking joke.

McCoy’s tired of being careful.

“For God’s sake, man. Just what is it you expect me to _do_? You’ve poisoned me, kidnapped me, and now I’m on an Imperial fucking starship in _space_ filled with your own damn crew. So unless that copy of my file you’ve obviously read mentioned something about me being goddamn Superman - which it really fucking does not, trust me - I think it’s safe to say I’m gonna do my best to heal your Vulcan here because it’s likely the only damn way I’m getting off of this tin can alive.”

A muscle twitches at Kirk’s jaw - anger or amusement, McCoy has no idea - and the silence stretches as Kirk stares at him, face unreadable. McCoy’s heart is jackrabbiting in his chest and the taste of the words he’s just spewed linger on his tongue, hot and sweet and terrifying.

He takes one calming breath. Two.

“Please,” he says, and it feels like a punch to the gut asking this man for anything. “Trust me to want to save him so I can save myself. We can both get what we want out of this but I have to know how much you gave me.”

Kirk doesn’t once look away from McCoy’s face.

“Okay,” he says, finally. “Okay.”

 

 

Preparing the antidote for rensis leaf was never going to be a walk in the metaphorical park, but preparing it while _spiked_ with the fucking thing is a whole different torture. Beneath his fingers, McCoy can feel the individual ridges in the metal of the adjustment knob as he studies the breakdown of the leaf cells beneath a microscope. He can feel the shift and grind of joints at knee and elbow and finger when he moves; the weight and texture and rub of clothes against his skin; the warm press of his shoes against his soles and the spread of his toes as he walks between machines, reading diagnostics.

The nurse - Chapel, Kirk had called her - watches him silently. She shows him how the machines work when he asks her to, all of them at the cutting edge of technology and too expensive for him to have ever encountered in the armpit of a planet he now calls home. She’s blonde, attractive, and doesn’t once put down her phaser as she supplies him with everything he needs. Before leaving, Kirk had said: “Keep her informed. Every single process,” and so McCoy keeps up a running commentary, aware of the slick rasp of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, the slide of saliva, his own breath hot against his dry lips.

In the sterile, artificially lit room, time slips by unnoticed, heralded only by the soft beep of the machines monitoring the Vulcan. McCoy’s only three-quarters done when he notices the delay between his brain telling his fingers what to do and his fingers actually doing it. Scowling, he hunches over the desk and redoubles his efforts, ignoring the steady thrum of panic running just beneath his skin. He stops only when a beaker slips through his clumsy, unresponsive hands, the glass hitting the floor and shattering.

In his peripheral vision, he sees Chapel jerk in surprise. He turns to her and the phaser already aimed directly between his eyes, her lips pursed and her hands steady.

“I think,” McCoy says, more calmly than he feels, “you might need to take over.”

Concentrating hard, he gets his feet under him. He manages four sluggish steps before his knees give out and dump him on the floor. He catches himself on his hands and grunts with pain as the impact shocks up his wrists and forearms, jarring his shoulders.

Chapel is already at the intercom, speaking soft and urgent into it. She keeps her eyes on McCoy, her phaser unwavering - like she expects foul play. McCoy stays where he is, his legs nothing but deadweight beneath him and his pride stopping him from crawling.

When Kirk arrives, he has a security detachment with him.

“Get him up on a biobed,” he says, shortly. “And careful with him. We need him conscious.”

McCoy’s definition of _careful_ is not one apparently shared by his present company. The grip of hands around his shoulders and thighs are tight enough to be bruising and he’s gasping with pain by the time he’s been manhandled up onto the nearest empty biobed.

Kirk is talking to Chapel.

“You can do it?” he asks.

“If he can direct me,” she says. “He’s good.”

Kirk nods and turns to McCoy. For a long moment, he just looks down at him, his head tilted to one side and a slight crease between his brows, like McCoy is a problem that he can’t quite solve. Then, he reaches out and curls a hand around McCoy’s throat. The touch is cool and impersonal, nothing but a loose grip. A threat. Fear-sweat collects in McCoy’s palms and at his temples as he stares wordlessly up at Kirk, waiting.

“You know,” Kirk murmurs, “I think I prefer you like this. Helpless and humble suits you.”

McCoy blanches. “Fuck you,” he snarls, all the angrier because it’s true, he _is_ fucking helpless and there’s nothing he can do - can’t even shrug out from under Kirk’s hand and Kirk goddamn _knows_ it, the smug son of a bitch.

Around him, the sickbay goes eerily still and silent. Chapel looks shocked, a hand half-way to her mouth, and the thugs from security snap to attention, their hands moving to the phasers at their hips. Expectant.

Kirk just grins, wide and bright and frightening. “Maybe not so humble,” he says. “I told you to watch that mouth of yours.” The fingers at McCoy’s throat tighten, the pressure increasing for an uncertain, breathless moment. Then Kirk steps back, the hand falling away, all business once more. “Chapel is competent enough. You’ll explain what she needs to do and she’ll follow your directions. The guard will stay here. Jacobs, raise the head of the bed so the good doctor can see what’s being done.”

Without waiting to see his orders obeyed, Kirk leaves.

McCoy meets Chapel’s eyes. “Okay,” he says, grimly. “We’re going to have to work quickly. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep talking for.”

“I’ll manage,” Chapel says. She raises her chin as if daring him to suggest otherwise, her expression as sure and steady as her hands as she holsters her phaser.

McCoy doesn’t doubt her.

 

 

Kirk is there when Chapel administers the antidote. McCoy knows this because he’d listened to Chapel inform the bridge (“It’s ready, Captain.”) and Kirk’s response (“Wait for me.”). He had heard the pneumatic hiss of sickbay’s doors opening and closing, the rustle of clothing as the red shirts stood to attention, the soft pad of footsteps over towards his bed. McCoy can’t see the man because Chapel had thumbed down his eyelids a while ago, noticing the tears streaming unchecked down his face, but McCoy knows he’s there. He can feel it in the way his paralysed muscles want to tense, fight or flight, that instinctive desire to _survive_.

Chapel is careful when she draws up McCoy’s sleeve. Goosebumps follow in her wake as she wipes the skin down with antiseptic. Sometimes a hypospray just isn’t enough, and it’s little comfort to know Chapel’s acting on his own directions. McCoy has no choice but to lie there and feel the long, sharp slide of the intravenous needle entering his arm and the deep, steady ache of fluid swelling his vein. Nausea curls in his belly.

“How long will it take?” Kirk asks, sudden and unexpectedly close.

“I don’t know,” Chapel says. “If it works, the doctor estimated between twenty to fifty minutes.”

Kirk’s response is the jagged screech of a chair being pulled towards the bed.

“I’ll wait,” he says.

 

 

Twenty-seven and a half minutes later, McCoy can speak again without drooling. He ignores Kirk and tells Chapel to set up another drip at Spock’s bed.

“You have good hands,” he says, at the look she angles at him. “Start him at ten milligrams.”

Mercifully, Kirk remains silent.

 

 

McCoy aches with a tiredness he hasn’t felt in a long time. Kirk had abducted him at the end of a full day’s work, and the last five hours of carefully monitoring the Vulcan, dosing him milligram by cautious milligram, with the constant threat of death hanging heavy over his head, has drained his reserves bone dry. His eyes burn in his sockets and he’s collected that itchy, unwashed feeling beneath his clothes. He wants a stiff drink and he wants bed - preferably in that order, but he’s not fussy.

So when the Vulcan’s fingers twitch, McCoy glares at them suspiciously and waits. When they twitch again, he feels like breaking down and crying with relief.

 

 

First Officer Spock is awake and alert - a living miracle on a biobed - and he watches McCoy in cool, collected silence. It’s fucking unnerving is what it is and McCoy hunches his shoulders against the feel of it as he studies the Vulcan’s final readouts.

“These are good,” he says. “You have no permanent neural damage and your brain scan came back clean. So unless you want to tell me about the little green men at the end of your garden, I think you’re safe to be released.”

Spock raises an eyebrow.

“Never mind,” McCoy mutters. Fucking Vulcans.

As he moves to turn away, Spock reaches out and grips his forearm, stopping him. The rusty brown smears of life that used to be M’Benga haven’t yet been cleaned from the walls and floor of sickbay, and the elegant hand on McCoy’s arm is still dirty with murder. Schooling his face to blankness, McCoy meets the Vulcan’s eyes.

“I want to thank you, doctor,” Spock says. “If it were not for your expertise, I would be dead. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

The Vulcan looks sincere.

Surprised, McCoy shrugs. “Forget it,” he says. “I’m not gonna be ‘round long enough to collect anyhow.”

Spock doesn’t let go of his arm. “Where will you go?”

McCoy frowns, uneasy. “Back to my practice on Ethon Five. Your captain promised me safe passage once you were recovered.”

“Ethon Five is a mining colony,” Spock says.

“Yes,” McCoy replies, tersely. “I’d noticed.”

The grip on his arm tightens and Spock studies his face for a long, unnerving moment. Then, suddenly, he releases him.

“Very well,” the Vulcan says.

McCoy retreats to the far side of sickbay and pretends to be busy as he watches Spock get up in his peripheral vision. Spock changes into the fresh, unbloodied uniform waiting for him, his movements stiff and economical. Then, without another word, the first officer strides out of the room, leaving McCoy alone with the two guards.

 

 

They give him some food, some drink. They tell him to sit down and to shut the fuck up when he asks for the fourth time about seeing the captain.

Too exhausted to argue with phasers, McCoy puts his head down between his arms and dozes. It’s that, or stare at the dried blood on the walls.

 

 

McCoy had known when he had first seen the size and quality of its sickbay that the _ISS Enterprise_ was an impressive ship. Being led through the warren of corridors, flanked by armed red shirts on either side, McCoy begins to realise just how impressive she is. The _Enterprise_ is gleaming and sharp like a new knife blade, and the crewmembers they pass have a similar edge of threat to them, honed to violence.

McCoy is careful not to meet anyone’s eyes.

“Here,” Lead Red Shirt says, and puts a hand on McCoy’s shoulder, stopping him none too gently outside a door. The man presses for access and, after a short pause, the door opens with a hiss of compressed air. “Go on,” he says, and gestures McCoy forward.

Kirk is waiting for him inside the room, slouched back into an easy chair, a glass of something alcoholic in his hand. The door slides shut behind McCoy, enclosing the room in silence, and McCoy realises the security detachment hasn’t followed him in. He’s alone with the captain and Kirk is smiling at him - nothing but a kid with blond hair and blue eyes.

Given the choice, McCoy would ask for the six, heavily armed guards back.

“Have a seat,” Kirk says, and nods at a chair across from him. “Whiskey?” he offers, and raises his glass with a smirk.

“No,” McCoy says, with bite. “Thank you.” The seat is too close to Kirk for McCoy’s comfort but he takes it anyway, not left with any other choice. Right here, right now, he needs to play as nice as he can. He sinks down into the leather and grips the chair’s arms, white-knuckled.

Kirk takes a sip of his drink. His eyes slip close and he hums softly, clearly enjoying it. “A man killed a man for this bottle. And I killed him. Sure I can’t tempt you?”

“I want to talk about my return home,” McCoy says, voice even.

Kirk opens his eyes. “Oh?”

“You said.” McCoy says. “You said - when your Vulcan was cured - you said I could go home.”

Kirk smiles at that. “I did, didn’t I?”

Maybe it’s something in his voice, something in his expression, but when McCoy looks at him, he _knows_. Knows this kid, all relaxed sprawl and lazy grin, has no intention of taking him back to Ethon V. Not now. Not ever.

“You can drop me off at the nearest planet,” he says, desperately, because he’s got to _try_. “I can make my own way back.”

Kirk isn’t looking at him anymore. He swirls the whiskey around the bottom of his glass, watching the light catch in the amber liquid.

“Do you know how I found you?” he asks, and pauses, waiting for McCoy to respond. When McCoy remains silent, he continues. “Out in the middle of bumfuck, deep space, and my first officer gets poisoned with something that none of the remaining medical staff onboard have even _heard_ of. M’Benga’s dead and I’m shit out of luck, sitting around and twiddling my fucking thumbs, until one of my officers tells me she’s found an ex-Starfleet doctor who just happens to be practicing on the very shithole of a planet we’re orbiting. And, she tells me, the survival to death ratio at his practice is off the fucking charts for a guy who barely scraped through the Academy and got kicked off the ’Fleet as a dead loss as soon as he graduated.”

Removing his hands from the chair’s arms, McCoy tucks them into his lap, clasping them tight together to stop them from shaking. He can feel the echo of sensitivity from before, his fingers clammy with sweat, his nails pressing deep into his palms.

Kirk is looking at him again, and his gaze is too knowing. “My first officer came to see me shortly after you released him from sickbay,” he says. “Would you like to guess what he told me?”

McCoy shakes his head, mute.

Kirk leans forward, intimate, like he’s sharing a secret. “Spock told me that rensis leaf is considered incurable by all but the very best of physicians. He told me that if Starfleet had realised your true potential, they would never have let you go. He suggested that if they ever discovered your deception, they would punish you severely for it and keep you under lock and key for the rest of your life.”

Kirk smiles blindingly and slouches back in the chair. He takes another sip of whiskey, so casual, like he hasn’t just sliced into McCoy’s very existence - split his life down the middle and peeled back the bloody flesh - and is now holding his beating heart in the palm of his hand.

McCoy slumps in on himself, defeated. He’s too exhausted to feel the terror he knows will come.

“What do you want from me?” he asks.

Kirk shrugs, careless and young. “You might have noticed that I’m missing a CMO,” he says. “And you look like you belong in that sickbay. A doctor with a penchant for saving lives is a novelty, and once the crew stop trying to kill you for it, they’ll start liking you for it, I’m sure. You’ll see a lot of action but I’m guessing it won’t be anything you can’t handle.”

McCoy laughs - a bitter, twisted noise which grates in his throat. “What choice do I have?”

“None,” Kirk says, truthfully.

He gets up and fetches another glass. Sloshes a dram of whiskey into it and offers it to McCoy. McCoy hesitates, then reaches out and wraps his fingers around the cold, slick surface. He brings the glass down to chest level and stares at it.

“It’s not poisoned,” Kirk says - his captain now, and McCoy has no choice but to believe him. He sips the drink and the whiskey coats his tongue, smooth and syrupy, the warm taste of dark chocolate and vanilla and wood spices. The best bourbon he’s ever tasted and McCoy shuts his eyes, savouring it. Raises the glass to his lips and takes another slow swallow.

When he looks up, Kirk’s watching him too closely.

Cold dread settles deep within McCoy’s chest. “Oh god,” he says, horrified. “It _is_ , isn’t it?”

Kirk throws back his own whiskey in a single swallow. “No,” he says. “The water served with your food earlier was. The effects should have already begun kicking in and Chapel’s ready and waiting for you down in sickbay for when I’m through with you.”

McCoy stares up at him, numb. “But why?” he asks, because he doesn’t understand, Kirk already _has_ everything McCoy has to give. There’s nothing left.

The kid smirks, his gaze hot and lingering. “Like I said before, doctor, the drug has certain desirable qualities. Paralysation, relaxation of the sphincter muscles, heightened sensitivity.”

The glass falls from McCoy’s nerveless fingers and he moans, the guttural, fearful noise of a trapped animal. He staggers upwards, out of the chair, only to be met by the firm, relentless pressure of Kirk’s hand on his shoulder, pushing him back down.

“Relax, McCoy,” Kirk says, too gently. “I’ll make it good for you. I promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: The title reference has kindly been explained in the comments if you're not familiar with Greek mythology. :)


End file.
